The hanging lamp swung back and forth from the ceiling, flickering one and off. Even if the power to Illuminates Outpost #1 was completely stable it would still be flickering. It was simply the nature of such lights, in rooms such as this, to flicker when not giving off a irritable hum.

The poor moogle was seated on a hard aluminum chair under this flickering spotlight, a few well placed books boosting it up enough so it could rest its head on the wooden table in front of it if it wanted. The poor thing shivered as a face emerged from the gloom across the table. The face of a man with an unnaturally large grin, and as the man loomed over it the moogle heard a voice in its head. [i]Salutations, little friend,[/i] it said. [i]Could you tell me what you told the people in the square?[/i]

"Indrid!" Came a female voice and the flip of light switches. The light, though still flickering, was now coming from many lights hanging above a drab looking circular netting room. Georgia stood by the door, hands on the switches, looking cross while Snopes sniffed around for dropped food at her feet. The man sitting across from the moogle, an uncomfortably tall sort, sat up and turned his smile toward her. She crossed her arms and walked forward. "You know all that does is make people uncomfortable."

The man tilted his head, confused.[i] Mios suggested I speak intimately with it.[/i]

Georgia turned and looked at the rooms only other inhabitant, a three foot tall alien with a rounded grey head and big black eyes currently snickering at the moogles predicament. He stopped when he saw her look. "C'mon, it's funny. Besides, that little guy ruined my whole model." He said' swinging his hand to a bulletin board that had once been festooned with lengths of string and thumbtacks linking various pictures. Now everything lay piled on the floor, as though ripped down in rage. The grey threw his hands up in the air and jumped off the table to pace. "Heartless. Heartless! It doesn't fit. There are no logical connections. It's like they jumped right out of the blue to ruin eveything!"

"That's what they do, Kupo." The poor thing squeaked, earning it a dark look from the grey. "They must be stooooooowww."

"Oh, sorry." Georgia hadn't been listening to his short rant though. She advanced on the moogle with single minded purpose as soon as she'd seen him and pinched him right where she thought his cheek would be. "Spongy, like one of those old stress balls. Tell me, how do you breath?" She said, whipping out a pad and pen and taking a knee so she was at his level.

"Listen..." 

"Is it through your skin?"

"Please..."

"Because you don't have a mouth. Follow up question, do you have a mouth and where is it?"

"This concerns the end of your world, Kupo!"

All three of them looked at one another. Then Georgia turned back and said. "Sorry to break this to you, but you're seven years too late for that party."

"Look." The moogle said, shoving the letter in their faces. As they did Georgia narrowed her. "I thought that if anyone would know where to find this worlds keybearer it would be this organization, Kupo."

"Keyblade?" Georgia said, picturing what that would look like in her head. "It look like this?" She held out her hand, and in an instant the thing appeared. 

[hr] 

She really didn't think it looked all that much like a key. The handle sort of did, being silver and surrounded by rounded edges that, when she thought about it, sort of reminded her of a flying saucer. Where the...blade part...met the handle it was engraved with the illuminates crest, the inverted pyramid with the all seeing eye. The actual blade, if you could call it that, was just a pair of big spoons twisted together with the bits at the end bend backwards.

She supposed it did sort of look like a key, if you turned your head and squinted. What it definitely didn't look like a a blade. It didn't look like you could cut butter with the thing.

Looks could be deceiving, though. She at least knew that. Her family was a bunch of shape shifters, after all. Even if they hadn't been, she'd seen what this thing could do when she'd been assaulted by those "heartless" cryptids out in the wild. 

When she'd found her way back to what passed for civilization these days she'd found she wasn't alone in the experience. Merchants and other Illuminates had been reporting sightings of these strange, new, incredibly hostile creatures. For now they mostly seemed to be confined to the surface continent of my, in the center of the great reptillain empire that resided there. There had been theories, of course. Tulpa was a popular frontrunner, an alien plot, a new undiscoverd variety of shadow people, but after a time the word Heartless had started being applied to them. 

The source of that word, it had tuned out, had been the small creature currently piloting this deceptively comfy little ship though, well, another dimension. Once the little guy had laid eyes on that key he'd insisted she accompany him to Constantinople, which Indrid had informed her was old Istanbul. When she asked why it wasn't called that any more, he'd just told her that was nobodies business but the Turks. Then he'd chuckled cryptically and vanished when she'd looked away, as he did.

She didn't know what she was suppose to do about this Heartless business, but that didn't matter. These were new, strange, totally unknown creature they were dealing with. It was her job to shed light on the things that lurked in the dark, he duty as an Illuminates agent. If there was any information to be had on these things on some far off world, that was worth checking out.

More than that, though, there was that line about enemies. Watching her. The thought of something invisible watching her and her people, spying on them without their knowledge, turned her stomach. Maybe it was just paranoia, but then again it had all been dismissed as paranoid before and look at where they'd ended up after doing that.

She leaned back and tried not to stare out into the void too hard as the ship made its way to Rnnovation.